TV Guide for Aussies (8 Viewers)

[voxmortis]

BKCH,

Have emailed you a rar file of my old bladerunner set up... as I said, used to work well.

D1XMLTVGrabber no longer grabs pay tv for me, this used to work well too (less info than Bladerunner used to give though).

Am currently looking at the obfuscation of the data on the ninemsn site.

Anyone good at Javascript out there? Can you look at this source and tell us how to get the guide data?!
http://tvguide.ninemsn.com.au/guide/10112005_73.asp?channel=free&day=10/11/2005

Doug.

 

[BKCH]

D1 stopped working about 3-4 weeks ago for pay - I think they still do FTA.

I did actually get tvharvest working perfectly before ninemsn ruined my whole day with their changes $#%@!$%!

Anyways, I'm still working down the line of tvguide.org.au...

 

[Callifo]

BRP was fixed to grab the new format now but there are a few changes needed to the data to get MP to read it. Still trying to work around it now.

 

[voxmortis]

BRP just does free at the moment, but confident Monster et al at XPMCEAU will sort it out soon and give it back to us Pay TV types.

 

[BKCH]

If anyone is interested I'm making some progress with grabber for tvguide.org.au - I've got it outputing an XMLTV format file with both pay and FTA content....

(now gotta go help bath the kids - back to it in 1-2 hours!!)

 

[SiLenTYL]

ive finished writing up the webepg pay tv grabber...it uses au.tv.yahoo.com and it gets all channels(including Foxtel, Foxtel Digital, Optus, Optus Digital and FTA) ...ive passed it on to _James_ so we should see it next build

theres no desciptions, just times and program names ...as yahoo blocks u getting extra info if u try more than 3 times in a day...so please deselect "LINKED PAGES" to make it faster

...leeme know how it goes

 

[James]

Hi BKCH,

I would be interested in your solution for tvguide.org.au.

Also I have found some examples to running Javascript in C#, So I will test these. These will enable support for site that use Javascript in some way. Including Ninemsn.com.au and Foxtel.com.au, that use Javascript to encode the text.

I am happy to develop solutions for all these sites with a little help.

Cheers,

/James

 

[BKCH]

Hi James - I'd be very happy to help - getting this data into WebEPG would be excellent.

So - good news - my marriage (and HTPC budget!) is secure!

I have a big beautiful working FTA + Foxtel EPG WooHoo!!

It remains to be seem what the long term accuracy but a quick surf points in the right direction! I even have descriptions, genres and actors!!!

So - the path to EPG happiness is as follows (this probably seems a little long but I wanted to include all steps):

Go to tvguide.org.au and register (then login to the tv guide section and set your preferences - don't worry about selecting all the channels you want - just pick one and click save )

One note here is that tvguide.org.au relies on people entering in guide data so we probably need to do the right thing...

Anyways - now you need the grabber:

1. Download the grabber from: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~willu/xmltv/tv_grab_au_tuhs.

2. Download and install a python interpreter - I used the free ActiveState distribution found at: http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePythonFamily/?tn=1.

3. Edit the grabber:

Comment out (with a #) the line:
time.tzset()

Change the line:
config_file = os.path.join('.xmltv','tv_grab_au_tuhs.py')

and get rid of the '.' in '.xmltv' - Windows don't like the '.'! (this is optional but probably good advise)

5. Run tv_grab_au_tuhs.py --configure

6. Edit the file that was created in the above set (it's also called tv_grab_au_tuhs.py and is probably in c:\documents and settings\<your user>\xmltv\.

In the obvious spot put your username and password for tvguide.org.au.

You'll also need to add a line for each channel you want to grab - it should be pretty obvious but the format is:
{'Display': '<MP channel name>', 'tuhs': '<tvguide channel name>'}

7. Run: tv_grab_au_tuhs.py -o xmltv.xml -o tvguide.xml

8. Point MP at your new tvguide.xml, change your timezone offset (mine was 11 hours)

9. Enjoy

(you then need to edit your config file

 

[voxmortis]

Have written some VB to de-obfuscate the ninemsn data. Was going to translate their webpages for the whole week, and repost the website on my own (or geocity type) server, then the old Bladerunner and any other epg could parse the new website without changing code, just the URL.

Looks like BKCH has the best solution tho... and it seems legal (tho I'd like to see ninemsn take me to court for parsing the data on their public website for personal use!)

 

[samuel337]

If you use tvguide.org.au, be nice and contribute something back - people manually enter a lot of that data, so it would be nice if you contributed too if you use that as a data source 8)

BTW, if anyone wanted to know why D1 stopped providing pay-tv data, see here:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tvguide/2005-November/001087.html

Seems like foxtel caught up with them...

Sam